“Why not?” Carver heard himself say.
And Latham showed him once again his reptile face, which only slowly dissolved into goodwill.
It was Avondale who laughed, friendly and sympathetic.
“The impatience of youth. Don’t worry, Carver, we’ll make it. You’ll see the lights of London long before the dark moves in.”
(Avondale, who had shaken his hand outside the restaurant, and called him ‘son’. As Croft would do, before Croft blew his own brains out of his skull.)
Carver swallowed more mouthfuls of the wine. Not many. Then put down the beaker.
“What makes you think,” said Carver, “I’m going with you?”
Avondale smiled on and averted his gaze, as if to save Carver humiliation.
Latham did not remove his attention. He said, “Because, Carver, you have nowhere else to go.”
Carver said, “That didn’t stop Croft.”
Latham said, “It was you, Carver, who stopped Croft. As intended. Yes. Obviously we have used you, ruthlessly. It was essential. Their nest here was a danger to us, and to the security of the whole country. But no longer. Your debut has been a total triumph. You’ll get used to your success. Everybody does. Or... the ones that want to survive do so. What you have to get into your head, Carver, is that you are completely safe with us–”
“That is what Croft said to me.”
“Naturally. But in the case of Mantik, it is true. You are, with us, entirely safe. And that is because we, at last, are entirely safe with you. We’ve made ourselves so. You can’t hurt us. And we, Mr Avondale here and I, for example, Ms Dusa, and all our other members, are now in that same fortunate position. Oh yes, you could, just conceivably, harm any one of us with some amateurish physical violence or other. But I don’t advise you to try. Because without us, Car, you’re really on your own. Do you see yet? Do you? Anyone else you will now almost certainly destroy utterly, from the brain outward. The same way you destroyed every person working here, even those who had no direct contact with you. But we are immune.” The tone, at last, not jammy anymore, lizard voice of silver scales. The firm father with the hard hand, though not blind drunk or crazy. Blind sane. “We are your only family now, Car. Just as, in another way, we are, say, a family for Silvia. But in your case, Car, additionally we’re the only solid refuge you can go to. We didn’t cause your ability, Car, we didn’t make you. But we developed you. And there isn’t, now, any other cunt of a person or fuck of a place you can run to that won’t end up just one more here, and one more Peter Croft.”
Carver found he himself had looked away.
He stared into the deep red pool of the wine in his beaker.
No, he did not want to drink any more of it. Or get up and go anywhere else.
He sat, letting his eyes fill with redness.
And heard Avondale say, quietly and affectionately, to a nice mother with a rather difficult child, “Maybe, keep your eye on our friend, eh, Silvia... Can we leave that with you? No hurry. There’s time. Take your time.”
“Is it Avondale then?” Carver asked, ten minutes or thirty minutes later. By then the other men had left the room.
“Avondale ...?”
Her voice had remained Silvia Dusa’s.
“You’re the Second Scar. I’m the Third. Is Avondale the First?”
She chuckled, quiet, no edge to it. “No. But he’s pretty high up in Mantik. Higher than they usually let on. He checked you out that night you two had dinner in London. Checked the effect you had. Yes, he was protected, but he’s one like Preece, or Sunderland – he has certain – developed sensitivities. He could tell better than a machine. His report on you was the final deciding vote. Then Mantik got you properly lined up, and everything went into action.”
“Including you,”
“Including me.”
“Dead on a slab.”
She did not reply. He did not look at her.
(The wine seemed miles deep now, how far did it descend into that other dimension it seemed to occupy? A bottomless henna lake. )
“Who’s the First Scar, then?” Carver asked. He had no knowledge why he did. He did not care.
“I don’t know him. I mean I’ve never met him. I was told a little about him.” She paused. When Carver said nothing, she continued slowly, thoughtfully. Maybe she was improvising, making it up as she went along. “He was born in Europe, somewhere between the Middle East and Russia. Three quarters English, one quarter something I can’t remember, some eastern European nationality, from his father’s side. The father was half and half, with a fully English mother. Apparently there was something wrong with the boy – defective genes, learning difficulties. Physically he was, well, odd. But she loved him, the woman, and the father came to love him. He was a very loveable infant for them, it seems. Phenomenally so. And his mother called him this unreasonable name – I was told it was something extremely religious, something like – was it Paradise? No, it wasn’t. But that extravagant and unsuitable. A curse of a name for a kid. For anybody. And then there was bad trouble out there, where the father was posted – he worked for the British government – and both parents were killed. But the boy survived. And it became obvious he had something special, exclusively astonishing. So Mantik took him on. He grew up in Britain, somewhere. He’s far younger, by the way, than Avondale. Of the three of us, apparently, I’m the oldest, if not by much. He’s about your age. Car. Thirty-one-two-three – whatever. I can’t recall his name.”
“Paradise.”
“I’m sorry. It wasn’t that. Kingdom of God–? Was it that? No. You see, I can grow my hair at will or turn it blonde–”
“Or be a corpse.”
“–Or be a corpse, yes. But I can’t remember the name of the first member of our trio. Perhaps you should ask Latham.”
“Ask Latham.” Carver smiled. His facial muscles simply did this. He did not know why, or why he spoke to her at all, this reasonable and couth young woman.
“There’s no restriction on him telling you, Car. Not now. Or I’ll ask, if you like.”
Like...
The pool of henna reached down and down. You could effortlessly drown in it. That was why they drank it, after all. To drown. It in you, you in it. Either/or.
A movement. Her chair shifting back.
“Let’s go outside, shall we?” she asked.
Why? Why not? Go outside.
Carver rose. He picked up the beaker and poured the last of the wine out on the cleansed floor. Only a trickle now, about deep enough to drown a fly.
The room opened on another lift. They descended two floors. The lift door drew wide on a sunny courtyard, shut in by the building on one side, and by walls nine or ten feet high on the other three sides. Tree tops visible, sky. Hint of sea-scent and faint putrid linger of smoke, with – here – the mildest tinge of human death in it.
The yard was paved, plain concrete squares. Tubs around, the plants undamaged, some with flowers. Two sets of garden tables, four chairs apiece. No one there.
Another door, metal, with a button to push, confronted them in the third wall. Presumably it led out to the grounds.
But Silvia had sat down on one of the two tables. She shook back her malleable hair and raised her face to the sky, eyes part-closed.
No noises anywhere. But neither did the birds call. Still no gulls flying over.
On either side, blank windowless angles of the building restricted further view.
In a corner, beside one of the tubs, a smashed bottle (overlooked?) sparkled happily.
The woman spoke.
“Try to relax, Car. We’ll be leaving fairly soon. Around two in the afternoon at the latest.”
Avondale: You’ll see the lights of London long before the the dark moves in.
London. What was London?
Carver pulled out a chair from the second table and sat on it. He would not, he supposed, be able to get rid of the girl. She was his (un)official minder. And she was strong
enough probably to manage him, was she? He would not want to try, would not want to harm her. Even if, in the shed –
Too late, Croft. I should have said Yes. Yours was the only way out.
Beyond the wall with the door there was a sound. Nothing to it, in fact. An ordinary sound. A couple of voices were talking without urgency or raised volume. And then, instead, a girl’s crying, but not that loud either. And then a male voice, but so very low, no meaning could be made of it except a sort of – kindness. The crying faltered and stopped. “Thanks, mate,” said another male voice, audibly.
Following which the silence returned. They, whoever they had been, had gone away.
And yet –
Something had not gone away.
Something stayed there outside the shut metal door. Something.
Not meaning to, not knowing what it meant, Carver had got up again. Silvia also had swung herself about on the table, her back to Carver, staring it seemed towards the shut door. Which sighed. And slid open.
Twenty-Five
Mainly sunshine filled the space, a starburst of white-gold. But against and out of the sun –
A silhouette evolved. Forming up and filling in, until substantial. Though advancing, it was at once reminiscent of a man seated against a blank lit window. An old trick. Filmic. Effective. A big shape, a big man, tall and excessively broad-bodied, thickly built of flesh. Croft? It was Peter Croft, animate and alive, and without the rear of his skull blown off.
He came rambling forward unhurriedly out of the light. Not only big, then, this Croft had ballooned into fat. And the suit was a tent, yet tailored and not graceless. The fashion in which he moved, too, had an almost absurd – elegance. The body did not seem either to mind or to be hampered by its potential obesity. Its lack of coordination was coordinated. Another species, and automated in its own unique way. Valid in its own unique right.
Shaggy hair, not grey, well-cut yet tufted, framed the profound countenance of a huge toad. The enormous eyes, river-brown rather than dark, were definitely not Croft’s, but bulbous. They glowed, having consumed some ray of the sun.
“Loandy,” the toad-being said. “You’ve all grawn up.” And stopped, positioned on the paving. Where instantly it was a fixture, cast from iron and set there to last forever.
As Carver’s vision adjusted, he saw over one of the bulbous shoulders. Two paramedics were leading a woman away along a line of trees. She appeared tranquil, going along brightly, without regret. She was not crying anymore.
Silvia spoke.
“I remember,” she murmured, “the name.”
“Yes,” said Carver. He too had realised what it must be, the name that implied Paradise, and had been altered by morons to fit apparent earthly circumstance. “Heaven. That’s his name.”
On the wide-screen of Carver’s mind the truth unrolled, some extravaganza of fiction that was fact. Suddenly he had it all. There could be and were no doubts. As, however reluctantly, one recognised oneself in a mirror.
Born in that other country far east of the Med, the trouble in the city or the town, the bomb-blast that negated the diplomatic building, Croft’s living quarters with it. Croft must have been elsewhere. He had not seen. His wife, the English woman, detonated into fragments like broken glass, and the child – the unwieldy impaired child Croft had begun by loathing and fearing, until those states altered into amazed love – shattered so small, as only a child’s body could be, not anything could be found. Not enough left of him to bury. Except they had lied. The British employers of Peter, or Petre Croft, Mantik Corp. The child had survived the blast. No one could figure out how. They had been together in that room, the mother and her son she had called Heaven out of the passionate belief she had in him. But where she and the room and all else had perished, the child, two, three years of age, he was untouched. Just as, those other years later, he would be untouched by the racing traffic on that suburban road, and with him the black puppy he had snatched, and known by then how to shield by his ungainly miraculous curled-up body.
And Carver could see – the three-year-old child wandering through the bombed rubble, and how he floundered to the hurt and howling, the screaming, the dying, and floppily touched them with his small ugly ungainly disgusting beautiful hands. And they grew serene and lay waiting, for death or rescue. And maybe some of them slept, or even laughed. Not minding, unafraid.
So Mantik, when they entered the scene, took the child with the obscenely perfect name. They carried him off as evil wizards do in some TV series for the fantasy-minded under-twelves. And they told Petre Croft that both his wife, and his son, had been killed. But Croft, though he believed it, on some other level, in some obscure way, sensed – smelled – the stench of treachery. And that was why he had, eventually, turned to other work, anything that might bring Mantik crashing down.
Carver knew, almost in words, always in pictures, how Heaven, by then known as Heavy, was allowed to grow up, supervised and guarded – yet left experimentally to the non-mercies of the mundane world. And while he was, Mantik, like all the cruellest and most cold-blooded guardian gods, noted every nuance of his development, and his – skills. His powers.
Subsidiary to which, they had seen him connect himself, unwanted, then welcomed, to another boy, this one the dark and sullen and uneducated little thief, Andreas Cava. And by that straightforward means, they learned bit by bit, that Carver too was worth taking up and manipulating, for future and relentless use. Heavy, Silvia, Carver. One, Two, Three. Scar, Scar, Scar.
He’s informed me of this, shown me, Heavy. That’s how I can see it, and know for certain.
Carver stared into Heavy’s eyes. Does he know? Does he know what Mantik are – does he understand? – The men were standing rather as they had, when boys, in the park, the very last occasion of their meeting. Not far off, nor close. May all the good be happy. And all the bad be good. Oh Christ, Christ.
“Your father’s dead. He’s wrapped up in a grade A body bag,” Carver jaggedly said to Heavy. “Did they bother to tell you?”
“Yes,” Heavy answered. “‘S all right. He’s fined now. And I’ll be able to be talking with him, like I do with moth–ah.”
Carver could feel the unexcitable warmth from Heavy. It was like the sunlight. And he could feel Silvia’s presence, now at his back, hot and cold like heating or freezing, fire and Arctic waters.
“She can change shape,” he said to Heavy. “And you can change – anything. But I – ruin and drive insane. And we are all Mantik’s slaves. Their whores.”
Heavy put out one of his awful, fat and misshapen hands, and touched Carver on the shoulder. Only an instant. There was no feeling at all from this, less than a leaf falling –
“Leafs do fall,” Heavy said, in a low unheard murmur.
– And after the fall – something...
Something.
What?
“I must go now,” said Heavy. “Lots man need helpful up there. It will be fined, Andy. Will be fined. Belief it. We are not too many. See you next soon.”
Above, so high, so far, a shape, and a shadow falling like a leaf, and then another, and another. And then the wild amused screeching of a gull.
Heavy raised his heavy head. He grinned into the sky with joy. “Gully birds,” approved Heavy. “They pull the sun.”
Up from the flat roof the second lesser helicopter lifted. The fair-skinned sky was open wide, and any gulls, sensibly, had veered to the west. The shrill-singing racket of the aircraft filled Carver’s ears like glue. Under and about him the rear seat vibrated and jarred. He was on the left, Silvia to the middle. Avondale occupied the right-hand place. He seemed, mollified by his drink and the general success, to be nodding off. No conversation started. There were no questions. Heavy was gone. In front, by the pilot, Latham sat. He was close enough you could pull his hair. It was the school bus.
Swiftly sky-borne, astoundingly high. The colossal blueness and the transparent gleam. And below, the building, some o
riginal wieldy house bought up and soullessly extended, erratically decorated, recently very blackened, here, there, by arson.
Carver could see now, the multiple extension of carefully planted and nurtured ‘grounds’, woods, rises, valleys. And then, a reduced yet shaking swing of the chopper revealed hillsides northerly, and behind, huge barren chunky crags collapsing statically downward to moorlands, grey-green and purple, miles beneath.
Where was this place? Scotland – some outpost of Avondale’s folly – No. Unless he had passed it over to the LLE – the true Life Long Enemies, to Croft’s organisation, some deliberate ploy – but it made no sense. What did?
As if it knew it had suggested too much, the chopper manoeuvred again, and the forward and side-view were solely of the south margin of the cliff. One last glimpse of the building and the lawns, the south terrace (so tiny now, toyland.) Then all the earth dropped away into an incredible abyss. At the bottom of which was not red wine, or eternal darkness, but the sea. Emerald near the narrow shoreline, curving over into outer ocean. And there the waves were a single thing, a glistening sheet of turquoise.
But it was not turquoise, of course. Not much is what it seems. Some things are not even – what they are.
About the Author
Tanith Lee was born in North London (UK) in 1947. Because her parents were professional dancers (ballroom, Latin American) and had to live where the work was, she attended a number of truly terrible schools, and didn’t learn to read – she is also dyslectic – until almost age 8. And then only because her father taught her. This opened the world of books to Lee, and by 9 she was writing. After much better education at a grammar school, Lee went on to work in a library. This was followed by various other jobs – shop assistant, waitress, clerk – plus a year at art college when she was 25-26. In 1974 this mosaic ended when DAW Books of America, under the leadership of Donald A Wollheim, bought and published Lee’s The Birthgrave, and thereafter 26 of her novels and collections.